Microcontrollers and IoT

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In my previous blog post I described my first encounter with the Spark Core. Today I want to demonstrate a first simple code example. For this I connected the Spark Core to a Weather Shield from Sparkfun. The shield offers sensors for light, humidity, temperature and pressure. It can even be extended with rain and wind sensors as well as GPS.
.The shield comes with a nice set of libraries and examples that I used as a starting point. To keep things really simple, I combine the entire Weather Shield source with the sensor library functions and the setup() and loop() into a single file. This did not take long and compiled quickly. I also removed the wind and rain related functionality as I did not plan to use those. The source code below takes measurements every second and writes the them to the USB serial port.

For debugging I used the Serial Communication link over USB. Windows users have to install a COM driver. However, MAC and Linux support the Spark Core USB functionality out of the box.
I was really pleased to see how well the Spark Core supports Arduino libraries and well written legacy code. With only a few code modifications I had the sensors up and running.
The setup is now streaming values over a USB cable to a PC. There I captured the values with Tera Term and created a Weather Graph from the comma separated values (CVS). The example below shows the pressure curve of a Bay Area Storm passing by at end of February 2014.This setup is a somewhat trivial example that a basic Arduino can also do. The project really does not take advantage of the Spak Core’s connectivity to the internet. So stay tuned for my next blog post where I will add internet connectivity to the setup.